Ep. 8: Waterwild
Dark as Dawn, Bright as Night, a novel
DARK AS DAWN, BRIGHT AS NIGHT is a dark fantasy novel serialized in seventeen episodes. This is Episode Eight.
New to the story? START HERE.
Previously: Hesper invites Ten into her Hall of Onyx and the things he finds there evoke painful memories and new sensations.
Up ahead: While Ten has been occupied with Hesper, Blythe has been doing some important work of her own.
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Blythe
The acrid smell of the mornrill burns my nostrils. I can smell it on the breeze that ruffles the long grass in the meadow around my cabin. I’m never far from the stench of the bridge waters, another of the ingenious little tortures my punishers accounted for when they made me warden.
Indeed all the soft, moist greenness of this place took some time to get used to. I tolerate it now, but give me the hard edges and sleekness of the the Dawn any day. Humanity, however, seem to love the wild: the wind, the grassy fields, the forests, and rivers.
So enchanted are they that I’ve long made my living from painting these so-called idyllic scenes. It has a certain rightness, capturing a part of this world and making it my own. Nature and the bits and pieces of the humans I collect for the Dawn. It’s small recompense, an echo of what I used to be, but I find it does suit me.
And while they might find them poignant, no reviewer or curator or gallerist could guess what the strange shimmers amongst all my lovely landscapes really are. They’d never know that the paintings are nothing more than a side effect of the job at hand.
Part of the job and all of a piece. The woods are painted in the same sickening green as the keepers, the rivers are oil slicks of flashing fractures, and the grasses are bowing to a fetid wind heavy with the smell of souls.
No odd juxtapositions. Just the hidden parts of the natural world made visible.
Tonight, though, I haven’t needed to put brush to canvas. There’s nothing to capture, no need to tune my attention to the underlying web of spirits, to tease out the one I seek, brushstroke, by brushstroke.
Tonight, my gossamer is empty, but I’m full of hope as I turn my steps to the keeper’s mornrill. Tonight, I bring her no diessence to cross, no fracture to submerge in her liminal waters.
Tonight, I come to take instead of give.
I tap the small glass vial in my pocket, reach a hand in, and fiddle with the spongy cork stopper, a strange energy animating my fingers, making me shiver slightly in a way that has nothing to do with the cold.
I’m nervous, I realize, a feeling that requires uncertainty, a lack of confidence in the future. It’s a strange feeling for me. For centuries, my fate has been sealed.
But now.
Now there’s a chance to rewrite the sentence handed down to me from on high.
The man, Ten, is a soldier, highly trained and capable of murder, motivated to save his daughter from a fate worse than death. And that daughter happens to be special, not just a shade, inert and malleable, but a force.
Together, the three of us may finally be able to bring down the Wright, monster of my own creation.
My penance fulfilled, I will be welcomed back to the Dawn, and I will stay far, far away from this human world, this filthy sty where pigs are raised for slaughter.
But first, I needed to fill my vial with waterwild.
It’s said in the Dawn that the Light itself created sacred pools of the waterwild, the source of all mornrills and the birthplace of keepers. Even a thimbleful of the stuff contains powerful magic, the magic of returns and beginnings. Origins and sources.
The kind of magic I need.
But like all things in my long life, it won’t be easy. If I succeed, though, the risk will be well worth the reward.
To find the waterwild one must first make their way to a mornrill. Easy enough for me, a frequent visitor to their waters. So I set off, walking the moonlit forest, my breath lingering on the air in a frozen fog.
Dark, quiet, cold.
Such places do not exist in the Dawn where the Light touches all things, and I squeeze my eyes shut against the mist and damp, letting thoughts of home warm me. When I open my eyes I quicken my step until I feel myself break through the trees. The mornrill is before me, shining glossy white in the moonlight with its burden of souls.
I listen to the grating rumble of the rushing water, take a deep, punishing breath of the choking air. But that’s not the worst of it. The onslaught on my ears and lungs is only an inconvenience really. The real problem is that these sacred waters burn.
When I first came to this world, I learned the hard way that this path back to the Dawn was closed to me. I’ve avoided the touch of a mornrill for a long, long time, but there’s no help for it now. If all goes well, though, it will only require a brush of my fingers against the surface.
I reach a hand above the water, take a deep breath, then drive it down below the surface. The pain is immediate and searing, but I force myself to stay steady, count to ten, as I grit my teeth and groan.
When I withdraw my hand, breath short, arms shaking, I wipe away the water still clinging to my skin, then press my throbbing fingers and palm against my chest with my good hand until the worst of the pain subsides.
Under my breath, I curse the Dawn. I curse myself for being weak. Most of all I curse that beautiful boy, the reason any of this happened in the first place.
How many nights have I sat seething, hating them all, hating everything, wanting only vengeance?
Soon, now. Soon I will kill the Wright. Soon I will feel the glow of the Light once more. Soon I will see all those who have wronged me. They’ll suppose I’m weak from my long absence. They’ll suppose I’m no threat at all, just a pathetic shell. Bitter, perhaps, but not dangerous.
I smile, clench my hand into a fist. It hurts, but nothing hurts as much as their scorn, their pity, and their disregard. I thrust my hand into the mornrill again and hold it there for so long I lose track of time.
Gods, it burns, and I cry out, scream until my screams become great gasping peals of laughter, the kind that is more sorrow than mirth. Finally, I withdraw my hand, hold it up before me. It’s pale in the moonlight, but nothing marks my skin. I flex my fingers, twist my wrist to examine my palm, the last waves of discomfort fading.
There’s no apparent damage done. Just a lingering sting. I wonder, for a mad moment, if I can ford the mornrill now. Forget my plan, force my way through agony to the other side. But the water is wide, and my whole body would be at its mercy. Not only that, but the keeper would certainly respond to my screams eventually, and she would be nearly impossible to fend off in such a state.
No, I need to stick to the plan, have patience. Dawn knows I’ve gone this long. Just a little while longer.
Retribution is worth waiting for.
***
To get to the waterwild one must walk as they walk in the Dawn. No amount of clumsy human clomping will take you there. One must walk as a god walks, striding across the land with intention. Yet each footfall makes no sound, leaves no mark. It is the way the great cats pace through their jungles and savannas, their paws falling to the ground with terrible grace.
My bones remember this purposeful step of my old life, and I follow the banks of the mornrill, anxious to reach my destination. Yet an hour passes, and I’ve moved far away from where I started, but I’m no closer to the waterwild.
A tremor of fear streaks through me. The heat of humiliation flushes my cheeks. Have I spent too long among this world’s teeming rabble? Have I forgotten myself so much that the waterwild remains out of reach?
I grow panicky with frustration and worry. I need the waterwild, or everything I have planned will be for nothing.
My steps become clipped and graceless. I stumble on a twisted root and only just catch myself before falling face first into the mucky edge of the mornrill. I pull myself into a crouched position and pause.
I close my eyes and breathe. This is not me, this bumbling, wretched creature. I breathe again and cast my mind back across the centuries. Let the ghost of what I once was fill me again.
Years and years. But the feeling is there, buried deep.
I reach for it.
Remembering.
I am powerful.
I rise, letting the feeling suffuse my body.
I am an eater of souls and shades.
I raise my chin and look to the stars.
I am a queen, a goddess.
I begin to walk, and this time I remember.
I remember the way it feels now. Steps full of potential, but weightless all the same.
I am the Dawn. I am the Light.
And then I pull my gaze away from the stars, and for a moment I think their remembered glow is reflected in my skin, but I blink, and still my skin gleams a quiet gold.
It’s been an age since I last saw my skin alight. Not since my exile have I felt that prickle of radiance.
It’s nothing like my former brilliance, but it’s enough to light up the mud at my feet and the boughs of the trees overhead. More than I thought was possible. Now, with each step, I travel not just miles and minutes, but a kind of distance that is deeper and older.
I ease into this old power of mine, enjoying its forgotten familiarity. How I’ve missed it.
The woods flash by, gilded by my passing light, and they press me on, anxious, it seems, to shed my awful glow from their ugly whorls and knots.
Then I step once more, and the night pulls away from me like a shed cloak.
There before me is the sapphire pool of the waterwild.
It lies like a bottomless gem in a small, wood-rimmed glade, glowing with a gentle pulse in the delicate light of an eternal sunrise.
Gone are the dense woods, lightless and forbidding. The trees here have an enchanted quality to them. Briefly, I wonder what it would be like to forget everything and slip amongst their handsome trunks, to lose myself in this twilit world, a place that seems far away from the concerns of gods and monsters.
But her voice spoils it all, even before I see the keeper’s verdant tresses and jade skin.
“This is not your place, Warden. Go now. You sully the waterwild simply by breathing.”
“If it were not my place, I would not have been able to reach it.”
“Some strange irregularity has brought you here. Pure luck that let you capitalize on your ersatz magic. I know not what pathetic guile you have learned from your time among the humans, but it is only by chance you have come to this sacred place.”
I let the keeper’s words sink in. The first stirrings of rage warm my bones, sending out waves of heat to build in my belly.
Instead of tamping down that fire, I coax it into a steady burn, hot and strong, but not out of control. In response, the starlight glow of my skin grows more intense so that the keeper must narrow her gaze to protect her eyes.
“Does this look like an irregularity?” I ask, raising my hands up and turning them slowly, enjoying the way the keeper averts her gaze and lifts a hand to shield herself from the heat of my fire. “Do I seem pathetic to you even now, Keeper?
“What is it that you want?” the keeper hisses through gritted teeth.
“I have a plan. A way to rid this world of the Wright. We both stand to benefit from her destruction. The rills of your sisters will be relieved from the choking pollution of fractures, and I will have fulfilled my penance. I ask only for a little waterwild.”
I hold up the glass vial. I see the keeper’s black eyes grow feral, her undeniable beauty frays at the edges. She and her sisters like to believe that their true form is that of the ondine, majestic water spirits, gracious and proud in bearing, circumspect in the execution of their duties.
But we all become our truest selves when faced with our strongest emotions. And the ondines of the Dawn’s mornrills, when angry or fearful, shift and change.
Gone are their perfect contours, their verdant greens. Instead, they become brutish and wild, dreadful and twisted. They are brutal and relentless protectors of their waters. Once they take on this form, negotiation is pointless; survival is paramount. And this one was halfway there.
“That is impossible,” she says, her crystalline tones unraveling into a harsh bark. “The waterwild is hallowed. Even that little glass in your hand, filled with these waters, would be more magic than the human world is prepared to handle.”
“I do not seek it for the human world. I intend to use it only as a weapon against the Wright. She is powerful, Keeper. She needs powerful magic to be stopped.”
“I wouldn’t trust you with a drop from the dirtiest rill. These waters will not be tainted by you and your sorry schemes.”
“Keeper, hear my plan first, then decide if it is as sorry as you suppose.”
“Taking water from this sacred pool is forbidden. What you ask is impossible. I will hear no more of it. I suggest you leave. Now.”
“No.”
With that single syllable, I see the last of the keeper’s beauty fade away.
Her hands have elongated into the bent and broken sticks of a wetlands snag. Her teeth, sharp and vicious, erupt from the morass of her mouth. The rest of her rises from the water, slick and prurient, like the rot at the edge of a swamp. But she has, I know, the surprising strength and ferocity of all wild things.
“If you won’t leave on your own,” the keeper says, her voice thick and mangled, “then I shall have to see you out.”
“I won’t leave, Keeper,” I say. “And I know you won’t kill me. The highest echelons of the Dawn have ordered it so. For they know, as do you, that I can’t make my amends if I’m dead.”
“Believe me, I would see you dead for what you’ve done to our rills, for the carelessness with which you’ve treated the ancient balance that has sustained us for eons. There must be a thousand others from the Golden Realm that would be more than capable of killing the Wright. But I understand that part of your punishment must include our suffering. The Dawn asks much of the Sisters, and we have sacrificed and are prepared to withstand further indignities to see justice done, Warden. But there are other ways to make our point and enforce our ways beyond killing you.”
A pretty speech.
The Sisters are fond of pointing out their martyrdom. In truth, they are but expendable tools to those with real power. But this one’s monologue has given me time to survey my surroundings.
I can’t kill her. Not without my full powers. And even if I could, I don’t need the death of one of the Sisters on my hands. I have enough to answer for as it is. All I need is to incapacitate her long enough to fill my vial and make my escape.
With her recriminations out of the way, the keeper lunges forward. I roll to the side, but she recovers herself quickly, and I only just manage to skip out of the range of her grasping hands.
She floats back into the water, and I take advantage of her backward thrust to sprint forward. I jump, planting a foot on top of a rock protruding from the water, then use my momentum to leap across the remaining expanse of glassy pool, grabbing hold of a low-lying branch of a tree growing nearest the water. The keeper growls and rushes after me, creating a wake with her speed.
This time, one gnarled hand hooks onto the top of my boot. I kick out and land a blow to her face. I follow it with another, my heel squelching sickeningly into her mouth.
She staggers back, sinking into the water for a moment. I use the opportunity to swing myself up into the higher branches of the tree.
The keeper reemerges, black muck leaking from her open maw. She swings her head around, her burning eyes scanning the water’s edge and the surrounding forest. It doesn’t take her long to spot me.
“Leave this hallowed place, wretched creature,” the keeper seethes. “End this desecration. Or does your shame truly have no bounds?”
She’s slicing through the water, back and forth beneath the tree. There’s slim chance now that I’ll be able to get close enough to the pool to dip a pinkie in, let alone fill the entire vial.
I shake my head. It was a serious miscalculation, trying to reason with the keeper. I know where I stand with them, and yet I always underestimate their hatred, their utter dismissal of me.
I should have realized that talking with her wouldn’t have worked, and now she’s worked up and more dangerous than before.
Stupid. Stupid and lethal.
Despite what she said earlier, the keeper won’t hesitate to kill me if it comes to that. Her precious waterwild is worth any consequence.
“Go,” the keeper says, but her voice has become so distorted it’s more of an animal snarl than a word.
The sound of it reverberates through my bones, seeps into my blood. It’s the primal sound of the Dawn. The real Dawn of clawing survival and endless rivalry that all the golden finery and byzantine rules of etiquette try to hide.
My glow flickers. I close my eyes.
Retribution burns within me.
I will see the Dawn brought to their knees for what they’ve done. And in the end, the Golden Realm—all of it, from the lowliest mornrill keeper to the brightest archangels—will bow to me.
The light radiating from me intensifies.
It’s no longer a pale flicker or even a steady glow. It is the radiance I had so long thought lost to me.
I open my eyes, and the branches and leaves around me are nearly invisible, lost in the blank brightness of my body. I throw my head back and let the power wash over me in waves, reveling in the feel of it.
It’s been too long.
Slowly, I tip my chin down. The keeper cowers below me, a hand thrust up in a futile attempt to shade her eyes. I rip a branch from the tree and leap into the water below, driving the makeshift spear’s jagged tip into the slick skin of her chest.
The weight of my fall impales her, and she lets loose a guttural howl before we disappear below the surface of the waterwild. The searing burn of the water pushes in on me, but my light drives back the pain, and with my renewed strength, I press the exposed tip of the branch deep into the soft bottom of the pool.
The keeper struggles, her terrible face twisting into a grotesque mask of fury. I keep all my weight pressed onto the tree limb even as the bewitched water seeps past my glow, weakening my newfound power.
I watch as the water works its magic on the keeper as well, staunching the flow of green-black blood and healing the wound, forming a tight seal of skin around the wood and anchoring her to the pool’s floor.
The waterwild’s burn is insistent, submerged as I am in its power. It diminishes my glow, but the brightness is still enough to blind the keeper and fend off her touch.
Yet I know the branch won’t hold her back for long.
I push off from the bottom of the pool, feeling the waterwild continue to singe my skin on the short trip to the surface. I break free of the water and take a deep breath of the cool forest air, then kick hard for the shore.
It’s only a few short strokes, but by the time I drag myself out of the water, my light has nearly gone out. I reach a shaky hand into my pocket, terrified for a moment that I’ve lost the vial in the struggle. But, with a sigh of relief, my fingers find its smooth glass surface. I draw it out and remove the stopper, then dip it down into the shimmering water, filling it to the brim.
I’m pushing the stopper back on when a knotted hand bursts from the pool and grabs my neck, forcing me back. I collide with the ground and the vial flies from hand, shattering against a rock.
I watch as its contents sparkle in the twilight for a moment before melting back into the water, my despair at losing the vial distracting me for a moment from the relentless pressure closing in around my throat.
The keeper is on top of me, her twisted hands pressing into the skin of my neck, choking me and dragging me back to the pool. My feet scramble at the loose pebbles on the shore, but her pull is inexorable.
Burning waterwild sears my skin, while her blood, thick and putrid, drips into my eyes and mouth, oozing from the reopened wound in her chest where she has torn herself free from the pool floor. I pull at the twig-like fingers, but they hold firm as roots. The pressure behind my eyes builds as I struggle to breathe.
This cannot be my end. I refuse to die this way, at the hands of a keeper, a being that once wouldn’t have even dared to look me in the eyes.
I let the anger rise, let the light of the Dawn flow through me once more, and I shine even brighter than before.
I see my glow reflected in the keeper’s black eyes, and watch as fear chases fury from her ugly face. She tries to release her grip around my neck and escape into the waterwild, but I’ve already clamped my hand around her arm, holding her close to me.
She rages, thrashing against my grasp, but I am strong, flooded with the light of home. Finally, she lets loose an awful shriek as her face warps and melts in the unforgiving blaze of my white heat. I squeeze my fists and feel my own fingers dig into my palm as I burn through the keeper’s arm, and it drops to the ground by my side.
With another agonized cry, she retreats into the waterwild where she will need to remain for quite some time. Her wounds are significant enough that even the power of her precious pool may not be enough to fully heal her.
I stand at the water’s edge, aglow and triumphant. It has been many, many years since I last felt my true power. But, even amid my joy, I can feel weakness stealing over me.
No doubt, I’ve stretched myself thin. I’m out of practice, and I’ve used too much of myself all at once. I’ll pay for this later, and even as I think it, I stumble a little, lightheaded. I sink to my knees, breathe deep, collect myself. I still need the water and then I must be away. I know the keeper is gravely hurt, but I also know now that I shouldn’t underestimate her hate-fueled persistence.
I can see the shards of the vial from where I kneel. It’s broken beyond use. I cast around for some other vessel, and my eyes land on the shriveled remains of the keeper’s hand on the ground before me.
I pick it up a little gingerly, as though it might spring to life and try to throttle me once more. But it is very obviously dead. So dead, in fact, that it’s blackened and hollow, like a charred log after a fire. I examine each burnt finger and see that one is still intact at the tip, so that once broken off, it might become a serviceable substitute for my smashed vial.
I snap the finger off at the knuckle and dip it in the waterwild, filling the digit to the brim before staggering to my feet. The journey back will be long and difficult, weak as I am. But like the keeper’s hate, I have my retribution to fuel me.
I summon it now. The memory of my glorious light and the ravaged face of the keeper add fuel to my inner pyre so that I manage to sustain a subtle glow. It will be enough to see me back. And once I am rested and well, it will be enough for me to see the destruction of the Wright.
After her, well, I won’t stop until I bring the whole of the Dawn to its knees.
It’s a privilege to share my work with you! Thank you for taking the time to read the eighth episode of DARK AS DAWN, BRIGHT AT NIGHT.
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Now that was intense! Loved it.